Yesterday I attended #braindump at the Hub, to discuss Windows Azure, Win8, WinPhone and Xamarin development. With a focus on app development and getting local developers to publish (on any Appstore). The event had very good speakers and a diverse set of characters in the audience. I wish more people has attended but for me it was a great kickoff to a new project.

A nice surprise was meeting Chris Risner (@chrisrisner) who’s content I have been following for quite sometime. We had a chance to talk about mobile services and some of the challenges in marketing and exposing WAMS to other developers.

I also had the chance to chat with Jeremy Foster (@codefoster) on the pros/cons of XAML vs. WinJS for Win8 Development. He shared a very nice gallery of examples called CodeShow. I think this was the turning point for the current project and the move to WinJS. I’m glad I was able to attend his session 🙂

I was happy to see the guys from Xamarin show off some of the new embedded solutions and (repeatedly) answer the questions from the crowd on how to “develop iOS and android apps from inside Visual Studio”. I gotta give it to (@bryancostanich) for his patience with the crowd and hope to see some more awesome tools in the future.

Lastly I met Matt Harris Co-Founder of SendWithUS one of the few partners of the SendGrid team. His session was very personal, he evangelized on what had started as a personal quest for better email management and ended up being a company. It is hard to believe this is the outcome from 11 months of work from a 7 person team. I liked his product but more so his passion, it is hard to find people with that determination.

Abe’s Insight: I’m still in awe with some of the gaps in knowledge from the technical audiences I interact with. The fragmentation in platforms has been there from the beginning (this is not news). We have been developing iOS apps, Android apps and lately Win8 and WinPhone separately; the search for that “one IDE to rule them all” should be over by now…seriously. It is all a business driven decision, going the HTML5 route vs the Native one is not a matter of user base and numbers but one of product development and how an app should be an extension of your company/product/business.